Forbes
Google Chrome Will Block Ads That Kill Your Computer's Performance
By: Lee Mathews
Are you irritated by annoying online ads that bog down your browser and make your whole computer feel sluggish? Google is adding a new feature to Chrome that will nip that problem in the bud.
The new performance-boosting feature will target ads that violate any one of three criteria. Ads can’t take over the main browser process for more than a minute in total. They also can’t monopolize it for more than half of any 30-second period and can’t consume more than 4 megabytes of network bandwidth while loading.
The vast majority of online ads won’t be affected and that’s by design. Google says the goal was to target the “99.9th percentile of network and [processor] usage in ads.”
By Google’s estimates only about .3% of all ads on the web will be blocked. That doesn’t mean the impact will be insignificant. Those same ads are responsible for more than a quarter of all processor and network bandwidth used by all online ads.
Google has made similar moves in the past. In 2018, Google introduced changes to Chrome that helped block deceptive and abusive ads.
Yes, Google Chrome is now blocking even more ads. Yes, advertising is Google’s biggest source of revenue.
And yes, this move still makes sense from Google’s standpoint.
There are tens of millions of Chrome users that have installed an ad-blocking extension from the Chrome Web Store. One of the big reasons users cite for doing that is to block performance-sapping ads.
Those ad-blockers generally prevent far more than just resource-heavy ads and that means billions of lost impressions for Google’s ad unit. That’s despite Google making changes to its rules governing extensions over the years that many developers say have weakened ad blockers.
Google may be betting that targeting the worst advertising offenders may encourage Chrome users to consider uninstalling their blockers.
It’s also possible that extension policies could be tightened again and ad blockers would be further weakened — or eliminated from the Chrome Web Store entirely.
